"Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on." | by Nadine Burke Harris

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child's understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material ... or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely. When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them. This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then came William Farish." | by Thom Hartmann

"There is a tendency for each generation to privilege the popular literacies that they grew up with and dismiss literacies embraced by subsequent generations. For example, those milk toast Nancy Drew mysteries in the 1950s were lambasted by adults for causing kids to distrust authority. Today social media is similarly targeted by teachers as a punchline for trivializing teen culture. But in an age where only four out of ten students are engaged (Gallup Poll, 2013), classrooms need to stop making kids’ affinities wrong, and draw upon those literacies which most engage teens. In a landmark study discussed in Edutopia, Kristy Cooper identified “connective instruction” as having an impressive impact on student engagement." | by Todd Finley

"The policy framework for U.S. charter schools encourages “privatization and profiteering,” a research institute said in a report released Thursday. Charter schools are able to siphon off large quantities of public money for private gain — and only substantial changes to state policies regarding charter schools can stop this, according to the authors of the report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at University of Colorado Boulder. Many education reform advocates argue that the charter school model — under which publicly funded schools are administered by bodies other than the school board, such as private Education Management Organizations (EMOs) — promotes experimentation and newer, fresher teaching methods. But the same permissive charter regulations intended to boost innovation can also help EMOs pocket cash better spent elsewhere, the NEPC report said. “What we found is that there are a host of real estate and tax laws that were not put in place with charter schools in mind, but that the owners of charter school enterprises are using in order to profit,” NEPC Director Kevin Welner said. “I think that understanding the nature of the charter school gravy train, as I call it, is extremely important for the public and policymakers." | via America Al Jazeera

"Charlie Gaare is a high school English teacher in Denver and wrote down her thoughts on how gun violence has affected her life as a teacher: "Here’s the thing they don’t teach you when you’re going to school to be a teacher. There will be days where you have to think about how you are going to fit three adult-sized children into a glass cupboard and cover yourself with desks in order to protect the four of you. They don’t tell you that there’s going to be days where you are going to have a SWAT team member come in and put a gun in your face. They don’t tell you in 12 years time there will be more school shootings than you can remember or maybe even count. They don’t tell you that you are going to worry consistently about the day where it’s not going to be just a false alarm. They don’t tell you that you will eventually hate guns more than almost anything else. They don’t tell you that in equal measure, you will worry about how to protect kids at the expense of your own life, and worry about protecting kids from themselves." | via PBS Newshour

In his Oval Office address Sunday, President Barack Obama said that San Bernardino murderers Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik had “gone down the dark path of radicalization” and embraced “ a perverted view of Islam.” Malik was a recent immigrant from Pakistan, but Farook was born in the United States. He went to public schools in Riverside, California, and graduated from Cal State San Bernardino. But he never asked how an American citizen could attend 12 years of school and four years of college here, and then decide to attack his homeland. One possibility is that it is a failure of our education system, not just of foreign policy or law enforcement. Our schools are our central public mechanism for making Americans—that is, for socializing the young into the norms, traditions and beliefs of the nation. Or at least they used to be. Remember civics education? When Americans created our common school system, in the early 19th century, civic purposes lay at its heart. In a new nation of enormous diversity, the argument went, we needed schools to foster a shared American identity and consciousness. With the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, schools increasingly focused on the two subjects that the law required them to test: reading and math. That left less room for social studies, where most civics instruction takes place. Just five years after NCLB started, over one-third of American schools had decreased the amount of time they devoted to social studies." | by Jonathan Zimmerman

"Throughout most of U.S. history, American high school students were routinely taught vocational and job-ready skills along with the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. Indeed readers of a certain age are likely to have fond memories of huddling over wooden workbenches learning a craft such as woodwork or maybe metal work, or any one of the hands-on projects that characterized the once-ubiquitous shop class. But in the 1950s, a different philosophy emerged: the theory that students should follow separate educational tracks according to ability. Ability tracking did not sit well with educators or parents, who believed students were assigned to tracks not by aptitude, but by socio-economic status and race. The result being that by the end of the 1950s, what was once a perfectly respectable, even mainstream educational path came to be viewed as a remedial track that restricted minority and working-class students." | by Nicholas Wyman

"Today I want to talk about three of these trends – “themes” is perhaps the more accurate word: austerity, automation, and algorithms.

I have the phrase “future of education” in the title to this talk, but I don’t want to imply that either austerity or automation or algorithms are pre-ordained. There is no inevitability to the future of education, to any of this – there is no inevitability to what school or technology will look like; there is no inevitability to our disinvestment in public education. These are deeply political issues – issues of labor, information, infrastructure, publicness, power. We can (we must) actively work to mold this future, to engage in public and political dialogue and not simply hand over the future to industry." | By Audrey Watters

"I was reminded of this conversation during a recent presentation by Tyrone C. Howard on how student culture affects learning. Howard, the associate dean for equity and inclusion at UCLA provided a reality check to the heavy investment in skills such as grit that might help more students succeed. “We are asking students to change a belief system without changing the situation around them,” he said. It can be irresponsible and unfair to talk about grit without talking about structural challenges, he said, referring to the recent interest in interventions tied to the concepts of grit and perseverance." via The Atlantic

Understanding and awareness, is something we have discussed this semester in SPED 345, so this really stood out for me because we, as educators, really need to consider all possibilities as to why someone may have difficulties with something. Getting to know a student, and being able to recognize signs of abuse, or sadness are key points and may explain why someone is struggling in school.

"Math proficiency is a subject of a lot of anxiety for school leaders, parents and even national leaders. Employers and educators alike know that math skills are crucial to many of the science, technology and engineering jobs expected to be ever more important in the future, but students’ math comprehension continues to stagnate. In his TED Talk, mathematician Conrad Wolfram argues much of this angst is about how well students can compute by hand, not how well they understand math. In this talk, he takes on some of the most common arguments for the current way of teaching math, including the fear that computers will “dumb down” students’ understanding of mathematics. He’d like to see students demonstrate understanding of the process and procedures of math through computer coding instead of computation." | via Mind/Shift

"Project-based learning (PBL) has the potential to ignite students' passion in civic purpose and social responsibility, but how do we ensure that projects also demonstrate rigorous learning? Addressing this challenge requires robust approaches for assessing how learning happens through projects. But this doesn't mean that we have to take the fun, authenticity, or social relevance out of projects! Rather, we need to make opportunities to demonstrate learning more explicitly in PBL settings. A recent literature review of PBL (Condliffe, Visher, Bangser, Drohojowska, & Saco, 2015) (PDF) and the work of educational researchers and practitioners point to three approaches that have potential to enhance authenticity and rigor in PBL through assessment." | by Angela Haydel DeBarger

"Overall, The Peanuts Movie was cute. Visually it was well done, and though the main plot revolves mostly around Charlie Brown's silly crush on a new neighbor, the story successfully involves each of the characters in a nature true to the history of the franchise. Charlie Brown is the same "lovable loser" as we've always seen him. Until, that is, he learns he is the first student in the history of his school to receive a perfect score on a standardized test. Once surrounded in the hallways by googly-eyed schoolmates staring at his "100%" on the bulletin board, suddenly Charlie Brown is worth something. Not only to himself, but to everyone around him. Suddenly he is the most popular, most sought after boy in school, showing more confidence than ever before. Even Lucy wants to be near him." | by Karri-Leigh Mastrangelo

"A few months back, I watched the first episode of The Late Show with Colbert at the helm. It was rocky, at best. I wasn't sure which Stephen Colbert we were going to see -- the persona or the person. However, I stuck around for the next few days and watched the show grow into something pretty awesome. I feel like he was able to hit his stride and, in the process, he is now delivering a show that is smart, funny, and sincere. I realize that there are some people who have a hard time with his political stances. There are some people who find his comedy odd. That's fine. Colbert is not for everyone. However, I feel like there are a few things that teachers can take away from his approach: be earnest, assume your audience is intelligent, be goofy, embrace the love of learning, and make it joyful." | by John Spencer

Many children are still coming down from the excitement of the holidays. Two unstructured weeks away from school — with strange food, rituals and relatives — can be overwhelming for many children, especially when it grinds to a halt after the new year and normality resumes. But for students whose families are struggling in poverty, time away from school isn't an exciting blip on an otherwise calm school year. For them, it can be a crippling time of insecurity when it comes to food and shelter. And teachers can tell." | via NPR

"A total of over 140,000 gamers worldwide have now completed the Gamer Motivation Profile. Statistical analysis of how motivations cluster together is consistent with what we reported earlier. To make the Gamer Motivation Model easier to understand and share, we’ve put together some reference charts and slides. First, we have a chart that lists all the motivations and how they are related. Motivations in the same column are more highly correlated than motivations in different columns. The chart also provides brief descriptions of each motivation." | by Nick Yee

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes personalized learning is the answer to many of education’s current woes, and is one of the four key areas that he and his wife Prescilla Chan’s US$45 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will fund. For him, personalised learning is about teachers “working with students to custom ise instruction to meet the student’s individual needs and interests”. Although the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Personalized Learning Platform is not part of Facebook, the underlying principles are the same: human work is replaced by technology, algorithms provide users with content based on an analysis of their past behavior and demonstrated interests. This is similar to how Facebook’s news feed works, and other commercial personalization models based on text and behavior analysis.There has been much hype about the potential for new technology or approaches to disrupt education and, not unreasonably, there’s concern that investment in personalised learning may be a boost for Silicon Valley but a kick in the teeth for teachers" | via Business Insider

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recently announced to the world, on the occasion of the birth of their daughter Max, that would, over time, donate 99 percent of their Facebook stock they own — worth many billions of dollars — to “advance human potential and promote equality for all children. Education will play a big role in their philanthropy, they said, sparking concerns among some school activists about how they plan to invest. Here’s a piece raising these issues, from Leonie Haimson, a leader in national efforts among advocates to protect student data as well as founder of the group Class Size Matters." | via Valerie Strauss

e"Conventional wisdom about the past decade of education reforms has been that a number of policies have reduced teachers’ autonomy and constrained how and what they teach. Whether it is blamed on No Child Left Behind, Common Core, the meddling district, the scripted curriculum, or the foolish local principal, the widely held belief is that teachers have been losing their autonomy. My colleague Rick Hess even wrote a book to help teachers work around those familiar constraints and assert more autonomy. Now, the problem with conventional wisdom is often that it is not always right (teacher shortages are a case in point). But when it comes to teacher autonomy in public schools, new data back up the conventional wisdom. A report released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics (which I co-authored when working for a prior employer) looked at teacher reports of classroom autonomy in 2003-04, 2007-08, and 2011-12. From 2003 to 2012, there were statistically significant declines in teacher autonomy." | by Nat Malkus

"As I'm sure you've heard by now, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used the occasion of their daughter's birth to announce they'll be investing nearly all their fortune, some $45 billion, in good causes. They announced this, of course, in a lengthy Facebook note. "Personalized learning" makes up the first item on their wish list: "Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities." The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is making one main bet: Technology can broaden access to quality education." | via NPR

"My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach." | by Salman Khan

Ted Dintersmith is a venture capitalist and father of two who is now focused on education-related initiatives that call for a radical restructuring of what and how students learn. He organized, funded and produced the well-received documentary “Most Likely to Succeed,” and co-authored a book titled “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era.” Now on a 50-state tour to encourage communities to rethink the purpose of school, Dintersmith stopped in Washington last month to attend the first White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools, which the Obama administration said would “highlight new actions by philanthropy, industry, school leaders, and others, who are committed to re-thinking the way that high school education is delivered in this country.” To make a long story short, Dintersmith was not impressed with the summit. In the following post, he explains what he saw and heard and why he was so sorely disappointed about the experience." | by Ted Dintersmith

"Researchers and volunteers from Carnegie Mellon University have joined in on the endeavor to improve learning on a global scale by working to design software that would teach children the basic skills of reading, writing and math on a tablet or mobile phone. Such software is being designed in hopes of providing education to children in developing countries who otherwise do not have a structured education system available to them." | via Education World

"More than 50 years ago, the author Jesse Stuart wrote, “A teacher lives on and on through his students. ... Good teaching is forever and the teacher is immortal.” This is as true today as it ever was. Despite reports of how difficult the job has become, teaching remains a deeply rewarding career. It is a source of lifelong satisfaction for some of the most thoughtful and dedicated people in our communities. Maybe society has lost sight of the importance of teaching in recent years, and maybe that’s why we face a teacher shortage. The rewards of teaching might seem less obvious than they once did, the demands more overwhelming, the compensation less attractive. But as young people – and some older ones – think about careers that are satisfying and important, they can do no better than to look to teaching." | by Keith C. Barton

"The kids who have been raised by parents who watched their every move, checked their grades online hourly, advocated for them endlessly and kept them busy from event to activity to play date are tucked away in college. But that doesn’t mean their parents have let go. They make themselves known to schools, professors, counselors and advisers. And yes, college presidents. But those parents are forgetting some very important lessons in Parenting 101, and that is how to help a child learn how to really thrive." | by Amy Joyce

"Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain." | By Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

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